The United States and its security partners can enhance prospects for conflict resolution by striving not only to prevent or end violent conflicts but to eliminate their underlying causes as well, says Sandole. The United States must lead on this, he notes, because the "political will" of others and "our common security" depend on it. Sandole is professor of conflict resolution and international relations at George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in Fairfax, Virginia. He has been a visiting scholar with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), where he worked on both the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) and the Confidence and Security-Building Measures (CSBM) negotiations, and served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the CSBM negotiations in Vienna, Austria. He has also been a NATO research fellow and has recently been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research on the development of peace and security in post-Cold War Europe within the context of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

"Conflict resolution" means different things to different people. For many, including diplomats, the term means processes designed to achieve "negative peace": the prevention, cessation, or absence of war or hostilities in general.

Negative peace, however, does not go far enough; it is one part -- albeit, often an essential part -- of a larger process that is rarely attempted -- and if attempted, rarely achieved -- by traditional diplomacy. The remaining part consists of "positive peace": the elimination of the underlying structural causes and conditions that have given rise to the violent conflict which negative peace processes seek to contain. To put it simply, negative peace deals with symptoms of underlying problems -- "putting out fires" -- while positive peace deals with the underlying, "combustible" problems themselves.

Why doesn't traditional diplomacy deal with positive peace? One reason is that diplomats are trained in dispute settlement -- reaching agreements about how to establish negative peace -- without, good intentions to the contrary, necessarily addressing the underlying problems that gave rise to the disputes that are being settled. Hence, negotiations to end wars or to control or reduce armaments, resulting in treaties or other agreements, are efforts to halt or manage actual or threatened violence resulting from conflicts without necessarily dealing with their underlying, deep-rooted causes and conditions.

Also, diplomats, acting on behalf of their governments, tend to seek negative peace by usually (but not only) competitive (win-lose) processes. To be fair, it is difficult, morally and otherwise, to pursue a win-win strategy with people who are clearly war criminals. This does not, however, diminish the fact that negative peace alone is never enough to do the job; indeed, that without positive peace, negative peace may collapse, thereby leading to a resumption of the very hostilities it sought to suppress. This can be a never-ending prospect, as is the case in Cyprus where a fragile negative peace has, with one notable exception in the 1970s, held for some 30 years, but which is always at risk because of the failure of the parties, working together with the international community, to achieve positive peace.

Hence, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Montville coined the term Track Two diplomacy to reinforce the need for nongovernmental actors to complement the efforts of Track One (governmental) actors, especially when the latter have reached an impasse. Track Two organizations -- such as The Carter Center (Atlanta); the Conflict Management Group (Cambridge, Massachusetts); the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.); Partners for Democratic Change (San Francisco) and Search for Common Ground (Washington, D.C.) -- tend to use cooperative (win-win) processes to achieve positive peace.

Former President Jimmy Carter, for example, has been actively engaged in conflict resolution activities in countries around the world, including the Baltics, Ethiopia, Liberia, North Korea, and Haiti.

The Conflict Management Group has been engaged in conflict resolution programs with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), particularly the High Commissioner on National Minorities, which has been tasked with early warning and early action in potentially explosive situations involving minorities in the OSCE area, especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy (IMTD) has been active on a number of fronts, including facilitating dialogue

between Chinese and Tibetans,

among different factions in the Liberian civil war (with The Carter Center and George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution),

between left- and right-wing Israelis,

between Palestinians and Israelis, and

among Ethiopians from various ethnic groups residing in the Washington, D.C. area.

IMTD is also in Cyprus (with the Conflict Management Group) where it has worked successfully with Greek and Turkish Cypriots to establish a bicommunal board that includes persons close to the leaders on both sides, and, more recently, to create a joint conflict resolution center on the Green Line separating the two communities.

Partners for Democratic Change has established university-based conflict prevention and training centers -- plus national programs, including ethnic conciliation commissions -- in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia, to assist these countries in their transition from communism to democracy.

Search for Common Ground has been pioneering techniques and processes, including the use of television and other media, for bringing together adversaries seeking "common ground" in East-West relations, Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Africa.

Taken together, these and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in Track Two conflict resolution are creating an international cadre of appropriately trained persons who can complement, and therefore enhance, Track One negative peace with positive peace efforts.

Track One is clearly dominant in international conflict resolution, usually with little if any linkage to Track Two, doing what Track One does best: pursuing, achieving, and maintaining negative peace. Negative peace is where Bosnia is now. A few years ago, when I was interviewing heads of delegations to the (then) Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Vienna, one of my respondents implied that, without active U.S. participation in a NATO intervention, the wars in the former Yugoslavia could not be halted. Subsequent events have borne him out as negative peace seems to have come to Bosnia precisely because of NATO bombing of Bosnian-Serb positions following the fall of the U.N. "safe areas" of Srebrenica and Zepa, and the peace mission led by former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke that culminated in the Dayton peace agreements of November/December 1995.

Until recently, many thought that negative peace in Bosnia was doomed to failure, as the United States was adhering to its commitment to begin withdrawing its forces by December 20, 1996, the deadline for the withdrawal of the U.S.-led NATO Implementation Force (IFOR). According to many -- the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Richard Holbrooke among them -- this would lead to the resumption of war. But President Clinton's recent victory at the polls has enabled him to announce that the United States will remain militarily in Bosnia as part of a reduced NATO-led follow-on force -- a Stabilizing Force (SFOR) -- for an additional 18 months, until June 1998.

What can the United States do to enhance the prospects for success in the extended NATO-led mission in Bosnia?

The stage has been set for this: NATO, under U.S. leadership, established the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and the Partnership for Peace in 1994, to reach out to, and collaborate with, its former Warsaw Pact adversaries. These developments are a powerful sign that the Cold War is over and therefore, by implication, that nations are undergoing a shift from a narrow world view based on national security to a comprehensive one based on common security.

Hence, the United States and its security partners are conceptually able to move beyond negative into positive peace. What this will entail in Bosnia is for the United States and its NATO and other partners to remain there long enough to ensure that negative peace holds. At the same time, they should work with international governmental and nongovernmental (including conflict resolution) organizations, and with the conflicting parties, to pursue, achieve, and maintain positive peace.

With secure negative peace as a point of departure, positive peace in Bosnia begins with the reconstruction of the country. But lest the United States and its partners repeat the failure of the European Union to achieve positive peace in the Bosnian city of Mostar through substantial investments in rebuilding Mostar's infrastructure, this reconstruction must reflect a comprehensive peacebuilding strategy -- reconciliative as well as physical -- over a period of time.

Some frameworks that could be useful in guiding U.S.-led activities in this regard are:

the "contingency model" of Ron Fisher and Loraleigh Keashly, which matches an intervention with the intensity of a given conflict, and then follows up with other interventions designed to move the parties toward positive peace;

the "multi-track framework" of IMTD's Ambassador John McDonald and Louise Diamond, which combines the resources of nongovernmental conflict resolution practitioners with those of the business and religious communities, media, funders, and others as well as governmental actors, in the pursuit of positive peace; and

my own design for a "new European peace and security system" which combines elements of these and other frameworks within the context of the OSCE.

There is a working hypothesis implicit in all this: by expanding their options to include cooperative processes geared to positive peace as well as competitive processes associated with negative peace, the United States and its partners will enhance their prospects for success in dealing with the deep-rooted intrastate ethnic and other conflicts that seem to be the dominant form of warfare in the post-Cold War world.

Intervening in such conflicts may mean "taking casualties," particularly in cases where one party is attempting to impose a genocidal "final solution" on another, as in Rwanda or Bosnia. In such situations, the use of an appropriate amount of force to achieve negative peace may be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of positive peace. We should not, in such cases, allow the U.S. experience in Somalia to prevent us from acting. Genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia does, sooner or later, affect the interests of the United States and others. The use of such extreme violence to "resolve" conflicts anywhere in the world is not only morally reprehensible, but constitutes a model for others to emulate, perhaps increasing the costs of dealing with it later on.

The implicit emphasis here on early warning and early action is part of the gist of conflict resolution: being proactive instead of reactive. A proactive approach to problem solving worldwide is in the U.S. national interest. This means, among other things, pursuing a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy to avoid the necessity of having to issue unrealistic timelines in any future deployment of forces, plus paying the massive U.S. debt to the United Nations so that the United States can more credibly and effectively lead in the debate over U.N. reform as well as in efforts to craft effective international responses to problems worldwide.

Effective international responses imply working synergistically with other regional international organizations -- including the Organization of African Unity, the Organization of American States, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- to facilitate dealing with local problems, as well as working with the OSCE, NATO, the European Union (EU) and NGOs engaged in conflict resolution, in dealing with Bosnia and other conflicts in Europe.

The United States -- where conflict resolution is most advanced as an applied field -- cannot afford not to lead on this one: the "political will" of others and our common security depend on it.